Read Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 for Free Online

crusade to build socialism, capitalism had seemed for many people to be synonymous with world imperialism, the senseless slaughter of the First World War, goose-stepping militarism, and Great Depression unemployment.
    Against that background, the idea of a non-capitalist world—with the same modern machines but supposedly with social justice—held wide appeal.
    But in the Second World War fascism was defeated, and 19
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    after the war the capitalist dictatorships embraced democracy. Instead of a final economic crisis anticipated by Stalin and others, capitalism experienced an unprecedented boom, which made the Depression a memory and homeownership a mass phenomenon. Economic growth in the US, after a robust 1950s, hit a phenomenal 52.8
    per cent in the 1960s; more significantly, median family income rose 39.7 per cent over the decade. In Japan and West Germany, losers in the Second World War, economic ‘miracles’ led to revolutions in mass consumption. New media technologies, such as cinema and radio, which had seemed so convenient for interwar dictatorships seeking to spread propaganda, turned out to be conduits of a commercial mass culture impervious to state borders.
    Finally, all leading capitalist countries embraced the ‘welfare state’—a term coined during the Second World War—stabilizing their social orders, and challenging socialism on its own turf. In short, between the 1930s and the 1960s, the image and reality of capitalism changed radically. Affordable Levittown homes, ubiquitous department stores overflowing with inexpensive consumer goods, expanded health and retirement benefits, and increasingly democratic institutions were weapons altogether different from Nazi tanks.
    As if that was not pressure enough, the Second World War and its aftermath also set in motion a wave of decolonization, which the Soviet Union sought to exploit but which ended up further undermining its position. The Soviet Union was a land empire, with a twist. Whereas the 20
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    pre-revolutionary Russian empire comprised only non-ethnic provinces, aside from the Duchy of Finland and the small Central Asian ‘protectorates’ of Bukhara and Khiva, the Soviet Union consisted of fifteen nationally designated republics with state borders. Beginning in the 1920s, Moscow presided over an expansion of the republics’ national institutions and national consciousness, which endured the purges, mass deportations, and Russification. Two of the Union republics, Ukraine and Belarussia, got their own UN seats, and all underwent economic development.
    Proudly, the Soviet Union contrasted itself with the capitalist empires of Britain or France. By the 1970s, however, after almost all overseas territories controlled by capitalist countries had gained independence, the idea of a better form of empire became an anachronism. The Soviet Union, moreover, did not have just an ‘inner empire’ but also what George Orwell called an ‘outer empire’.
    Chasing Hitler out of the Soviet Union back to Berlin presented Stalin with the irresistible opportunity of regaining some tsarist territories not reconquered in 1917–21, and with swallowing much of Eastern Europe.
    Not content merely to exercise political and military domination, the Soviet Union attempted after 1948 to clone satellite regimes. Yet Sovietization of Eastern Europe took place not during the 1930s Great Depression and fascist militarism, but during the post-war capitalist boom and deployment of comprehensive welfare states. In these altered circumstances, the fate of Soviet socialism was now irrevocably tied to the fate of the regimes in Eastern 21
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    Europe. Already in the early 1950s, and especially after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin in 1956 and Poland and Hungary had erupted in revolt, Eastern Europe weighed down the Soviet leadership. ‘If we depart Hungary,’ Khrushchev told his colleagues behind